Content provided in partnership with

My dinners with Isaiah: the music of a philosopher's life

Commonweal, August 14, 1998 by Ned O'Gorman

He told me at our first meeting in Oxford, in April 1991, that he was an old man and would soon die. Might I have lunch with him in Salzburg in August at Tomaselli's? It was a cafe I loved, and our conversation that April day was filled with wonderful correspondences. Who, he asked, were the pianists I most admired? I named five and was right on the money: Radu Lupu, Richter, Brendel, Murray Perahia, and Andras Schiff. I asked him, quite terrified that I would be taken for a fool, did he not think Horowitz was very bad? He did.

Most Popular Articles in Reference: The importance of understanding organizational culture; Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students; What factors attract foreign direct investment?; Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...; How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques; More »

When Isaiah was twenty-one, he wrote music criticism for the Oxford Outlook under the pseudonym of Albert Alfred Apricott. Even then he knew who he was - a mixture, a plural man, part Ariel, Puck, and Falstaff, and part sage, each lovely human facet of him cohering and radiating complete delight and the most elegant and yet not unflamboyant manner. He made the balance endure with grace.

I think that Isaiah found the world a marvelously interesting place. He was caught up in it, in its curiosities, in its absolutes, in its queer turns and sudden precipices, and how one wanted to know all about it. We used to play a little game: we thought of an imaginary line. On one side was genius and a sort of dwelling place of the great, and there was the space leading to it. Who got close, who got over the line, and who didn't get anywhere near it? We deliberated long about the quartets of Shoshtakovich, five of which I had heard the previous night. We decided that no matter how harrowing and tragic his quartets, somehow they are too exposed to the tempests of his feelings, too raw, too muddled to achieve the divine. But Isaiah could move with the agility of a tumbler to exclaim the next instant over what a "fine picture" Georg Frederich Kersting's Lesender bei Lamenlicht was. (He did not make it over the line.) It was the mix Isaiah understood so well. Pluralism is a mix, and in it one can discern, if one looks with a pure eye, the lineaments of truth.

I used to come to London or Salzburg, where we met over the years, armed with ideas, a new book, and once with the discovery that Andras Schiff played Bach quite as well as Glenn Gould, if not better, perhaps, being less rigid and less technical and closer to the soul of Bach. Isaiah loved Schiff's Bach. It was that mercury in Isaiah, that breakneck way he had of going from one thing to another as if he were composing a sonata: the melodies and sonorities of the mind and the imagination always in tune, at perfect pitch. During a chat about the Jewish mystics, especially about one Uriel Acosta who was a heretic and died a most gory death, a rich American lady, a friend of a certain great age, entered the restaurant and sat across from us. Isaiah said, "I cannot talk to her," and was out onto the sidewalk in a flash.

I think that the notion that the speed and the dance of the mind might soon stop made him so resent the idea of death. He was annoyed that he had to die, as if one had to expect that in the middle of a Schubert sonata or a Beethoven string quartet the music would stop and the players would sprint out for a game of cricket, leaving the beauty and the wonder abandoned to the void. There-was still so much to do, to see. Once, at the Atheneum, one of his London clubs, he reflected that he had never written about the Romantic poets and wished to do exactly that soon. Isaiah was intent on it because I do not think poetry came easily to him. I once sent him a first edition of the American literary critic Richard Blackmur and wonder if he had a chance to look at it. I think they would have been great friends. And at that tea, in the midst of musings about death and the Romantics, we talked of Verdi's Falstaff and of his sublime aria in the second act when Falstaff recollects his life as a page in the Court of the Duke of Norfolk ("Quand ero paggio del Duca di Norfolk"). We sang it loud enough so that some eyes turned toward us. I pronounced some word incorrectly. Isaiah corrected me and looked at that moment at a beautiful young woman with a fall of the most luminous blond hair who was seated nearby.

In December 1995, I had gotten the notion that Isaiah and Mitsuko Uschida, the colossal Japanese pianist, should meet. I brought them together in a lowly basement bar in Picadilly. All the clubs were closed. It was a terrible day - sleet, rain, snow, strong winds. We drank champagne, and oh, what wonderful stories I heard. When we said farewell to Mitsuko, I walked Isaiah back to his flat in Albany. Along the way we began to hum the opening bars of Schubert's Sonata, in B Flat, D. 960. I remember how cold it was. Undaunted, he paced along. Isaiah wore neither scarf nor gloves; he pushed away the air, the sleet, his voice piercing the winds. I got something wrong, the trills, I think, that crash up out of the abyss of Schubert's melancholy in the first movement. Isaiah set me right. Got me on pitch.

Once, over lunch at the Garrick, he told me that one of the first songs he ever learned was "A Bicycle Built for Two." As we sang it together - "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true..." - we began to muse over just how Susanna's aria in the last act of The Marriage of Figaro went, going over bits of it to get it more or less right.

My dinners with Isaiah: the music of a philosopher's life

Commonweal, August 14, 1998 by Ned O'Gorman

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: News

Most Popular Articles in Reference

Most Popular Publications in Reference